After Miss Julie: Play

Patrick Marber's "After Miss Julie" is not a translation of Strindberg's classic, "Miss Julie" but a version of it, moving the action from the original nineteenth-century Sweden to the England of 1945 - specifically to the 26th July, the day of the British Labour Party's "landslide" election victory. Miss Julie is the daughter of an aristocrat who, drunk after a party, flirts with her father's chauffeur John and sets in train a series of events that lead to tragedy. Class suspicions and resentments, the erotic collusion of antagonists, the struggle against repressive social mores - all feature in this sharp, tense drama which combines Strindberg's original vision with Patrick Marber's own consummate skill in drawing believable and psychologically astute characters whose every word has point and deadly meaning. It was set in the period of 1945.